While much study has been directed toward the post war consequences of "impartial" militarized intervention considerably less attention has been paid to the consequences of intervention when states are biased for or against a specific actor. In fact, interventions fitting the peace-building or transitional assistance model of intervention represent only a small subset of a much larger class of militarized intervention. I argue that many of the standard assumptions regarding democratization, post war state capacity, and post war political violence adopted from experiences with the peace building models may not hold for this more generalized case. Building on the concepts of Doyle and Sambanis (2000, 2006) I develop a Strategic Heterogeneity Framework which seeks to explain how differences in an intervener's goals and strategies influence outcomes of post war state capacity, domestic stability (non-violence), and democratization. I conceptualize intervention strategy along two dimensions, bias and intensity. Bias indicates whether the external actor (intervener) has a strong preference for or against a domestic actor or in an unbiased case is "impartial" to the relevant belligerents. Intensity refers to the amplitude of the intervener's commitment and degree of intrusion into the politics and society of their target. High intensity strategies are those where the external intervener becomes the predominant political actor. In low intensity strategies the external actor is more an equal or junior partner. The Strategic Heterogeneity Framework anticipates that the bias and intensity sets up certain structural and agent-specific incentives and/or dis-incentives to democratize, build indigenous political capacity, and mitigate post war violence. This study develops and tests hypotheses derived from Strategic Heterogeneity Framework. As there is already a large qualitative and growing quantitative literature on unbiased peace operations, I chose to focus my empirical effort on the understudied biased dimension of militarized intervention. I identify two categories of biased intervention strategy: intervention partnerships and intervention patronage. Partnerships represent the low intensity variant where external actors facilitate but allow or require their targeted partner to remain the dominant political actor. In a patronistic intervention the external actor is predominant and the supported target is essentially a proxy or client to the external patron. Empirically, I find that patronistic strategies are generally "winning" strategies. External actors who provide the preponderance of military and political capacity tend to achieve their near term political aims; however, winning isn't everything. These same strategies set up perverse incentive structures which tend to create more authoritarian, less capable, and more violent post-war states. Partnership strategies, however, are no more likely to win a war than cases of non-intervention, but conditional on winning, democratization tends to be consistent with the degree of democratization that standard economic and social indicators would predict. The same holds for building state capacity. Partnerships also appear to reduce post war violence relative to cases of non-intervention and patronistic interventions alike.
Read
